1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a protein imprinted polymer film, especially a C-reactive protein imprinted polymer film and microchip system using the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Nowadays medical technology has reached a certain level, but still faces disease with low cure rate and is hard to diagnose. These diseases are often caused by multiple factors, and therefore hard to diagnose. Inflammation is a symptom that associates with multiple diseases, such as: infection, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, Alzheimer's disease, allergies, cancer and autoimmune diseases. This discovery appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 2004.
The characteristics that are common in these diseases caused by inflammation mainly result from multiple factors, which may make definite diagnosis very difficult, and hinder early treatment. Thus, it can even turn into an incurable and deadly disease. This makes early diagnosis very important, the sooner we can accurately diagnose the disease, the less threatening it becomes.
C-reactive protein (CRP) is secreted by the liver. The level of C-reactive protein rises up to 1,000 times higher than normal level when there is inflammation caused by trauma, ischemia, burns and infection in the body. The C-reactive protein acts as an indicator of inflammation. In clinical practices, because of its ability of detecting inflammation, it is used for screening and monitoring of organ injuries, or assesses the effectiveness of anti-inflammatory drug treatment on patients. In addition, a great proportion of premature birth is also considered as inflammation due to infection, and therefore C-reactive protein is also an important test item during pregnancy.
The risks of mortality and morbidity are higher in premature infants (delivered before 37 weeks of gestation), and prematurity is one of the greatest unsolved problems in perinatology. Preterm birth is a disease that can be caused by multiple factors, thus early diagnosis can not be done easily by examining clinical symptoms or by a single exam. Therefore the development of clinical tools for early diagnosis of preterm birth is important and necessary. Since a great proportion of preterm births are due to infection with inflammation, thus elevated C-reactive protein level in a pregnant woman may indicate a possible preterm birth. When a high C-reactive protein is monitored, early preparations can be made to reduce the risks and complications of preterm birth.
Protein sensing has always been an important area in biomedical research, but nowadays most protein sensors use biological molecules as the sensing layer. An issue has been proposed in the 2010 μTAS conference, because the use of biological molecules sensing layers, this kind of exam can never be put into practice. Thus protein detecting techniques has always remained as a laboratory exam, needing a long time period to run out the results, an expert to operate the exam, and expensive laboratory instruments and chemical agents.
A molecular imprinted technology (MIT) for selectively adsorbing target molecules using target molecules imprinted in a substrate consisted of an organic polymer and an inorganic network material to form the imprinted nanocavities on the surface of the substrate. In other words, this technology can be used to make sensing layers that act similar to artificial antibodies, only it can be fabricated faster, made easier and build cheaper. The technique used to imprinting templates of small molecules has been around for decades. However, many problems are occurred when trying to imprint large protein molecules such as 1. proteins are made of multiple functional groups, making it almost impossible to get specific adsorptions; 2. proteins are giant molecules (molecular weight from 6,000 Da to several millions of Da), which are hard to be captured by imprinted nanocavities; 3. proteins are hardly dissolved in imprinted solvents; 4. the proteins are easily deformed in a stimulating environment by denaturation. Therefore, the above problems reflect the difficulty of the development of the macromolecular imprinted film.